Dear Gauge: WTF?

Her Royal Catness seems to be under the impression that I am her personal sofa, and thus I have had to adjust my knitting to accommodate her.

In other news, while my brain gnaws over the ideas for the next sock design, I cast on for something relatively brainless: Top-down socks for the Husbeast. Originally, I’d thought that they would be another pair of the “Hermione’s Everyday Socks” by Erica Leuder, as they are unisexually-delicious, but started to realize that my gauge was sitting somewhere around “gianormous” on the relative scale of “will this fit the Husbeast’s feet?”

For those of you who need a translation on that, my gauge was sitting around 6.5 to 7 sts per inch using 2.5mm needles.  Which is weird.  Usually my gauge with 2.5mm needles is a relatively solid 8 sts per inch. I was noticing a wee bit of gauge weirdness with the Weeping Angel socks, but I chalked it up to compensating for the recent heat and humidity. The past couple of days have been cooler and more temperate, so that isn’t a factor. It could be the yarn, but I’ve used similar yarns before with little to no problem. About the only thing that’s changed is the type of needle I’ve been using. I’ve been using my Knitter’s Pride Dreamz wooden circulars, and it seems that they may be the problem.

In order to test that, I switched to the 2.25mm Addi needles that my Mum got me for Yule (see, Mum?  Told you they’d come in handy!). As I suspected, my gauge went to a very predictable 9 sts per inch. This means that if I go to my “usual” 2.5mm Addi Turbo needles, I should land right at 8 sts per inch, and my 2.5mm Knitter’s Pride needles are possibly closer to 2.75mm. Which is a shame because even though they weren’t expensive, they were surprisingly comfortable to knit with. I may eventually need to make a trip to Pudding Yarn downtown & pick up a pair of the 32″ cable 2.25mm needles.

It also means that I cast on Robin’s new socks about 3 or 4 times, and probably knit the equivalent of a full sock leg just on gauge testing. It also means that I’ve had to put more brain power than I normally would have to expend on a pair of socks that were meant to be relatively “brainless”.  As a result, I will be switching back to my 2.5mm Addi Turbos and likely knitting these as very very plain socks. The most vanilla of the vanilla.  The yarn will do all the talking on this one.

But then, that might not be a bad thing.

(and yes, that’s a copy of Alice Yu’s “Socktopus” in the background. At some point, when I’m off my designing kick & have found “the right yarn”, I have plans to knit a pair of Kwalla)